The unhappy urbanites

Houston Texas

From McGill:

How Happy are Your Neighbours? Variation in Life Satisfaction among 1200 Canadian Neighbourhoods and Communities

Online access to NBER Working Papers denied, you have no subscription

John F. Helliwell, Hugh Shiplett, Christopher P. Barrington-Leigh

NBER Working Paper No. 24592 Issued in May 2018 NBER Program(s):Labor Studies, Public Economics

This paper presents a new public-use dataset for community-level life satisfaction in Canada, based on more than 400,000 observations from the Canadian Community Health Surveys and the General Social Surveys. The country is divided into 1215 similarly sampled geographic regions, using natural, built, and administrative boundaries. A cross-validation exercise suggests that our choice of minimum sampling thresholds approximately maximizes the predictive power of our estimates. Our procedure reveals robust differences in life satisfaction between and across urban and rural communities. We then match the life satisfaction data with a range of key census variables to explore ways in which lives differ in the most and least happy communities. The data presented here are useful on their own to study community-level variation, and can also be used to provide contextual variables for multi-level modelling with individual life satisfaction data set in a community context.

You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf formatfrom SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.

No surprise.

You'd have to pay to read that, which I haven't done, so perhaps a press summary suffices instead.

From columnist Tom Purcell:

According to The Washington Post, the Vancouver School of Economics and McGill University have determined that people who live in rural areas and small towns are happier than those who live in congested urban and large metro areas. 

McGill’s happiness researchers have found that the happiest communities have shorter commute times, less expensive housing, less transience and people who have a greater “sense of belonging” in their communities.

This is obvious to anyone, I think, who has experience in this area. And yet we push people towards the unnatural urban world as if its an imperative.  Cities grow and grow, people move from one to another, and the level of despair grows higher and higher.

Yes, surely, not everyone in cities is miserable, to be sure.  But the nature of large cities combined with the highly unnatural nature of modern work combines to make much of it miserable.  And it makes a mockery about much of modern life.  The conveniences of cities, the "things to do", end up about being as appealing to most people in the end as being a caged tiger in a zoo is to them.

Of course people with money can buy their way around this, and often attempt to.  They'll buy expensive memberships to walk in artificial pastures called golf courses, and go on expensive vacations that take them out of the cities and back to the country.  Some will in fact take their urban generated income and relocate to more rural areas, often at the expense of the rural landscapes where they have relocated.  Indeed, this election cycle here locally features no fewer than three businessmen who have relocated to small town, well one small town and one wealthy enclave, in the state. 

But most people don't do that.  Having become rootless, and often having lost all connection with anything with roots at all, they're lost souls.  Indeed, the cities themselves provide far fewer roots now than they ever did before, when at least most of them, even fairly recently, were basically collections of borderless villages.

So this report is no surprise.